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The Ideal Family Vanishes on Film

By VERLYN KLINKENBORG;

Published: January 29, 1995

IF YOU LISTEN LONG ENOUGH TO THE conservative ode to family values -- in the Quayle or Limbaugh or Gingrich version -- you realize that it celebrates not the shape of the family but the restraint of the individual. In fact, the ideal conservative family is the smallest state, a paternal state strong enough to withstand the anarchic pressures that every family member puts upon it.

To conservatives, the family is a hierarchy -- father, mother and cadets -- and the conservative dream is a lifetime within the crystalline bosom of a perfect family, where individual liberty (always a disruptive force) has been sacrificed to familial coherence. It goes without saying that in a nation of perfectly ordered families, small government is a sure thing.

But perfectly ordered families belong to the world of political myth, which is where political discourse takes place. The realities of family life are always more diverse, more chaotic than politicians seem to remember. This year, among the documentaries eligible for Academy Award nominations, three films challenge this repressive fantasy of family life: "Martha and Ethel," by Jyll Johnstone and Barbara Ettinger, which opens on Friday; "Hoop Dreams," by Steve James, Frederick Marx and Peter Gilbert, which is in theaters, and "Crumb," by Terry Zwigoff, which was in competition yesterday for best documentary at the Sundance Film Festival and will open in April.

To all appearances, the most perfect of the families visible in these films are the Johnstones and Ettingers in "Martha and Ethel." The documentary is a lingering, slightly formal study of what happened when the film makers' own well-to-do parents hired outsiders -- Martha, a German baby nurse, and Ethel, a black woman from South Carolina -- to raise their children. On the surface, both the Johnstones in New York and the Ettingers in Greenwich, Conn., resembled the Republican ideal: they were wealthy and attractive, and neither mother worked outside the home.

Yet the job of raising their children was farmed out, for reasons that had mostly to do with fear and convenience. "I knew absolutely nothing about teen-agers," says Mrs. Ettinger, who hired Ethel Edwards, a slender, appealing young woman who became the maternal focus for the Ettinger family. "You don't have to birth a child to love it," Ms. Edwards says.

When Mr. and Mrs. Johnstone begin to speak of their children, there is an emotional coldness that reflects the callous perfection of their physical appearance. Theirs was a cotillion mentality, a white-glove approach to child rearing, as austere as it was polite. And Martha Kniefel's strictness suited them perfectly. "To be without children is always easy," Ms. Kniefel says. It's no wonder Jyll Johnstone, the film's director, appears on camera asking, "Why is there nothing happening inside of me?"

"Martha and Ethel" is set largely in the 1950's in a world of material wealth and emotional deprivation. The reverse equation applies in "Hoop Dreams," where the emotional richness of family life is plainly on view, despite poverty and the overpowering despair of life in the 1980's in Chicago's inner-city neighborhoods.

"Hoop Dreams" is oblique and incidental in the way it presents family life. This widely discussed film is a dispassionate portrait of two young black men, Arthur Agee and William Gates, who are struggling to thread their way through the obstacles that lie between them and their dream of playing in the N.B.A. Their lives are staged against a backdrop so bleak, so unpromising for poorly educated black men, that their only refuge is family, no matter how imperfect or un-Republican it is.

Nearly everything that happens in this film weighs against the Gingrich-led attack on women who depend on welfare. "Hoop Dreams" calls up images of young men on basketball courts, but it is all the more powerful because it dwells so intently on the home life of the Agees and the Gateses.

THE SCENES THAT STAY IN mind take place around the kitchen table, in the living room, within the emotional gravity of a strong if unconventional family core. Arthur's mother, whose husband drifts in and out of her life, struggles as hard for her own ambitions as she does for her son's, though for a time she falls back on public assistance. One of the most moving scenes in the film depicts her graduation from a small nursing program, and the scene is moving precisely because the viewer has come to understand how remarkable, given the world that surrounds her, this achievement is.

And "Crumb"? In none of these films is the gulf between the commercial and political myth of the American family and its often chastening reality more vividly rendered than in this documentary. "Crumb" is R. (for Robert) Crumb, the pioneering, controversial underground cartoonist, the creator of Mr. Natural, Fritz the Cat, the "keep on truckin' " logo and Zap Comix.

Mr. Crumb's work was standard reading in my circle of friends at Berkeley in the early 1970's. His cartoons defined the dislocated, distorted working of a mind on drugs, a mind that wandered into the street and was run over by reality. But it was our mistake to suppose that the pressures shaping his work were mainly hallucinogenic. It should have been obvious that someone as prolific and gifted as Mr. Crumb must have had a history perhaps darker and more complicated than a college kid like me could imagine.